If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in geography & cartography, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #86 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 6 schools in the Rocky Mountains Region to determine which ones were the best for geography & cartography students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 272 bachelor's degrees in geography & cartography to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Geography & Cartography School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of geography & cartography for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality geography program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on geography & cartography students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of geography & cartography students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt geography & cartography students go into to obtain their bachelor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized geography & cartography related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for geography & cartography students working on their bachelor's degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Geography & Cartography Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Brigham Young University - Provo is a great option for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. Located in the city of Provo, BYU is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Soon after graduation, geography bachelor's recipients typically make around $40,051 at the beginning of their careers.
It is hard to beat University of Utah if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in geography & cartography. Located in the midsize city of Salt Lake City, U of U is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Those geography & cartography students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Utah earn $2,399 more than the typical geography grad.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).